The former owner of Church Street business Good Times Gallery arrested for selling marijuana out of his downtown shop will spend more than two years in federal prison.

Derek Spilman, 45, appeared in U.S. District Court in Burlington on Monday, where he was sentenced to 29 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release.

He had pleaded guilty in August to conspiring to distribute marijuana, being a drug user in possession of a firearm and witness tampering.

A screen shot of court papers filed with U.S. District Court shows a photo included as an exhibit by the U.S. Attorney’s Office that depicts the distance between Good Times Gallery and Full Tank on Church Street. (Photo: Free Press)

Original arrest in January

Spilman, who was originally arrested in late January, has been detained in federal custody since March. His detention came after a judge found that Spilman violated conditions of release by attempting to intimidate a witness in the case.

The Statehouse lawn was a big draw for some special guests over the weekend hoping to avoid hunting season.

A small herd of deer was captured on video by the Montpelier Police frolicking in the snow. While it is a beautiful sight, police warned in a Facebook post, it’s also a reminder to keep an eye out for deer as you drive.

Deer are mating this time of the year and are facing pressure from hunters pushing them into areas they aren’t usually seen.

“It’s quite a thrill for me, honestly.”

Ted Pelkey’s giant middle finger sculpture apparently has fans beyond Vermont’s Route 128. And the Westford resident’s work of “art” will soon have a twin in Nashville.

Pelkey says he’s driving down to Tennessee with his wife later this month to hand-deliver a second version of his 700-pound wooden sculpture to singer Kid Rock. As WCAX first reported last week, the country music star called the 54-year-old Vermont native in December to express his admiration — and to ask if he could get his own middle finger sculpture.

Rock, whose real name is Robert James Ritchie, has made the crude gesture something of his personal signature through his personal appearances, song lyrics, merchandise, and album art. Pelkey said he first got a voicemail from Rock around Christmas, in which the 48-year-old singer said he “liked my style.” Despite recent controversies, Pelkey noted that Rock came off as a real “down-to-earth guy” during their phone calls.

“I would do it for him if it wasn’t Kid Rock,” he added.

Pelkey had the original sculpture commissioned in November to protest Westford town officials, who he felt were treating him unfairly in a dispute over his efforts to build a garage on his property. He paid a local artist for the massive middle finger sculpture, which he mounted on a 16-foot platform in his yard and lit with floodlights. Considered a work of “public art” under Vermont law, the giant bird was allowed to stay up, catching the attention of both Route 128 drivers and nationalnewsoutlets.

“It was critical to me to make sure that my neighbors and the people who live in this town understood that I didn’t put that up there for them,” Pelkey told Boston.com at the time. “It is aimed directly at the people who sit in our town office.”

Rock is paying $4,000 — the same amount that Pelkey paid — for the second sculpture. Pelkey says he recently picked up Rock’s sculpture from the same artist who commissioned the original and is looking forward to hauling it down to the singer’s Nashville home. According to the Tennessean, Rock owns 170 acres of property in the city’s Whites Creek neighborhood.

The second sculpture won’t be the first crass display Rock has put up in Nashville, even if it will be somewhat hidden in the city’s outskirts. Earlier this year, Nashville’s Metro Council reluctantly approved a 20-foot sign outside the rock star’s new Broadway restaurant, Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, that featured a giant guitar that was intentionally made to look like a woman’s butt.

Remember D.A.R.E., also known as Drug Abuse Resistance Education? It was the drug use prevention program launched in 1983, which has since been rebranded.

Ideas behind drug abuse and prevention education have changed since the 1990s when DARE and other programs hammered home the message “say no to drugs” and education efforts focused on horror stories about addiction and death to frighten kids away from drug use.

South Burlington Police Department’s D.A.R.E. program:

Cpl. Kevin Grealis of the South Burlington Youth Services unit of the South Burlington police, answered questions about what his DARE unit teaches fifth-grade students. The program continues in the seventh grade.

Burlington Free Press: What is DARE like now?

Grealis: It isn’t heavy on drug talk in the fifth grade. We define what a drug is, and we have a lesson on alcohol and tobacco. But most of the program is about decision making. The theme of drug use is looped into the lessons.

The officers meet with fifth grade classes at each of the three city elementary schools once a week for 10 weeks.

Resistance strategies or how to get out of peer pressure-type situations.

Communication.

Bullying and cyberbullying.

Getting help.

One of my favorite lesson is on stress. We define what stress is. We talk about how it makes us feel in our bodies. How it makes us act and what we do.

Then we figure out strategies to get rid of stress and identify positive activities kids might like to do.

BFP: What is the core idea in your teaching?

Grealis: It’s all about personal responsibility and problem solving, making safe, responsible decisions at home, school or in the community.

At the end of every lesson, situations are presented to the students and we use our decision-making model to figure out how best to resolve it.

BFP: What is something that comes of working closely with students?

Grealis: One of the biggest positives is we get to know the kids at a young age. They get to know police officers as people.

So, if they have other life issues they need to report or if they screwed up, or whatever, they are more comfortable coming to talk to us.

South Burlington’s student survey on drug use

Every year, students in middle and high schools across Vermont take a self-reported anonymous survey regarding their behaviors, including the use of tobacco, drugs and alcohol.

Students at South Burlington’s Frederick H. Tuttle Middle School in the 2017 survey when compared to their peers in Vermont were:

4 percent less likely to have ever used marijuana.

1 percent more likely to have used inhalants.

Were equal in their use of pain medication without a prescription.

1 percent less likely to have used a stimulant without a prescription.

3 percent less likely to have used tobacco products.

4 percent less likely to have used alcohol.

Questions about methamphetamine and heroin use were only asked of high school students. City kids were 2 percent less likely to have used heroin and 1 percent less likely to have used meth than their peers.

Use of tobacco, alcohol and other drugs increased with the age of the cohort, but generally remained lower than the Vermont average.

Recorded from ‘Seeking Pathways Out of the Opioid Addiction Crisis in Vermont’ live forum at Champlain College on Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Ryan Mercer, Free Press Staff Writer

More info on Vermont DARE:

South Burlington’s DARE program started about 20 years ago. Other participating Vermont police departments include Colchester, Barre and Brandon. DARE has free resources online to build family, community or school discussions on drug use, school safety and crime prevention.

BURLINGTON — Five candidates for state Senate faced-off in a forum Monday evening in the Channel 17 studios, and voters got to hear distinctly different plans for Vermont from both the left and right.

One fresh face was independent candidate Louis Meyers. He’s a doctor who says he is running for office because there are no physicians currently in the Legislature. He repeatedly stressed that the state is moving towards an “all-payer” health care model that will need guidance from people on the inside.

Another new face was Libertarian Party candidate Loyal Ploof. He laid out details of his party’s platform by calling to abolish the income tax and limit government involvement in individuals’ lives. He also spoke in favor of defending the Second Amendment.

Touting a similar message was Republican Dana Maxfield, who took a conservative approach on issues such as the economy, deregulation, Second Amendment and personal liberties.

On the issue of health care, Pearson and Sirotkin generally favored a more centralized and socialized system, whereas Ploof and Maxfield wanted less government involvement, more choice, and fewer mandates.

“We need more options and that should bring the price down,” Ploof said. “I have a friend of mine who lives in another state, he’s got the greatest insurance, chiropractic, everything. He chose his insurance, The government didn’t say, ‘Hey, you’ve gotta have insurance and this is your insurance.’”

Meyers and Sirotkin both were critical of the powerful position that UVM Medical Center has the overall health services in the state. Sirotkin noted pay disparity between UVM and independent doctors.

“We do have to right-size the players,” he said. “I’m on the Finance Committee and one of the things we’ve learned is … there are two sets of reimbursement rates from Blue Cross Blue Shield and MVP. One is for the medical center hospital and the other is for everybody else.”

Meyers explained why all-payer model may not be a great idea. This would entail health care providers getting an annual lump-sum of money, instead of getting paid through the traditional “fee for service” approach. The hope is that doctors would be incentivized to promote preventive care and keep patients out of the hospital as much as possible. Meyers said this concept can work small scale, but not so much big scale.

“It’s going to be an all-encompassing plan that’s going to affect everyone in this state,” he said. “As the national studies are starting to come out, they are not favorable to this kind of plan. “Two studies recently in the New England Journal [of Medicine] suggests that these are at best break-even and at worst can cost a tremendous amount of money. There are other much simpler options that we could have gone to and perhaps still could.”

On gun rights, Ploof and Maxfield criticized S.55, the state’s new gun law that limits magazine capacity, expands background checks to private sales, raises the gun purchase age, and more. Meyers, Pearson, and Sirotkin were all either involved in its passage or generally supportive.

Pearson praised the portion of the law that gives increased leverage to law enforcement to act if an individual is showing aggression that might indicate a shooting is about to occur.

“Prior to that law, if you had a neighbor who was being very vocal about frustration with the school or maybe even on Front Porch Forum, saying how terrible the school was, and then you saw them loading firearms into their truck the next day through your front window, there was nothing you could do because those were legally possessed,” Pearson said. “Now you have the ability … to call law enforcement and they can intervene.”

Maxfield, who said his son has just started sixth grade, did not believe that the law does anything to make his child safer in school

“I think if we were serious about trying to protect the children as opposed to just limit firearms, which seems to be what the real motive behind S.55 was,” he said, “[I think we would ask] what can we do at the school? What can we do with education involving firearms? What can we do with mental health?”

All the candidates generally agreed that small businesses need an easier way to grow in Vermont. Sirotkin praised an effort by Pearson this last session to streamline the start-up process with the state.

“90 percent of our businesses in the state of Vermont have 20 or fewer employees,” he said. “We need to focus on helping those businesses, and Senator Pearson put a bill forward this year where we are gonna have one-stop shopping for small businesses to incorporate, to get started.”